The fuck up returns

If the title was a bit wry before, now I really mean it

A few years ago, I had the idea to write an advice column based on the premise that I was qualified to do so in large part because I can hardly judge other people’s mistakes too harshly when I’ve made so many of my own. I called it Ask a Fuck Up, and I would like to note that this was just before what I think of as the sassy self-help trend really took off in book publishing, and airport bookstores everywhere became lousy with sweary titles like Get Your Shit Together, Girl! or whatever. Had I known that was coming I might have called it something else, but a big theme of this column is the impossibility of undoing certain choices.

The column started at a site called The Outline, which was eventually shuttered and everyone got laid off. Then it went to Jezebel, which was shortly after subject to the whims of a bunch of business guys in love with their own bad ideas. Next, it went to Gawker, which earlier this year was shuttered and everyone got laid off. Notably, this was done by the same guy who closed The Outline. Fire me once, shame on you. Fire me twice, etc. etc.

So now it’s going to live here on Substack, which surely augurs well for the long-term health of this site. I’m going to keep everything free for now, although I would dearly love for people to support this endeavor through a subscription if they feel so inclined. You will note I did not name my column Ask a Person With Good Credit and a Robust Savings Account.

If, by some chance, you came here not knowing anything about the previous incarnations of this column, or if you vaguely remember something about it but can’t recall if you ever enjoyed reading it, I’ve included some old columns below. Let’s hope this whole thing bucks my usual trend and goes very well.

Got a question? Email aafu.newsletter@gmail.com

Dear Fuck Up,

I'm a geriatric millennial and things have not gone as planned. I misguidedly got a Ph.D in the humanities. I had a series of fraught relationships with people who had avoidant attachment styles. I was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.

I don't mind the abstract idea of starting over — this is America and it's time for my second act — but I also have a lot of envy towards all the people my age (and younger) who already have their shit together, who chose secure partners and stable work, who didn't burn themselves out, who own property. I also feel isolated because it's hard for me to feel close to people like that, so I have withdrawn from several friendships. I gravitate towards others who are floundering because I feel more connected to them.

I worry I've missed my chance to build the life I want. The culture has moved on, my peers have settled down, and all that remains are, as Kerouac wrote, "the forlorn rags of growing old."

Do you have any words of wisdom?

Sincerely,

Over 35

Dear Over 35,

I have been aging disgracefully. Not simply in the physical sense, which is what people assume women always mean, although that’s part of it, because women always sort of mean that. I can feel my body beginning to abandon its sense of resolve, and I can hardly even blame it. After all, I haven’t been especially careful of or tender towards my creaturely self — I’ve rather taken for granted its sturdiness. Oops.

Still, I can accept the two-day hangovers and back pain as a kind of penance. Far worse is being confronted by the brute reality of math. Instagram is perilous, as my friends who are parents — parents, in my head, of babies; adorable little infants; charming toddlers — post photos of what it turns out are actual, legitimate-if-diminutive people who have hobbies and girlfriends and opinions about the world. And then there’s the wholly unfair fact that 37 always follows 36, and is itself inevitably followed by 38. In a just world we would all be able to camp out and take a breather along the way. A benevolent God would let me be 32 for at least three years, since 32 is by far the most sensible age a person can be. Unfortunately there is no room for negotiation about this, and no amount of fuss making can help.

Which won’t stop anyone from making a fuss about it. I’m sure a terrific fuss is about to be made, online and in print, as millennials begin to hit our forties. If I was slightly more craven I’d be pitching a book right now about how the economic factors that conspired to delay or deny my generation the typical markers of adulthood — buying houses, having children — will also cause this transition to come as an enormous and unfair-seeming shock. From Adulting to Middle-Aging or some equally dreadful title. I could contribute the proceeds to my retirement fund, by which I mean I could start a retirement fund.

The problem is I don’t think anyone in history has ever relished this strange period of being no-longer-properly young. It is always a great shock, whether you did the traditional house and kids thing or not. My mom burst into unhappy tears on her 40th birthday, which I remember clearly because I was 19 at the time.

Aging is the slow accretion of impossibilities, and at a certain point we start thinking less about all the things we could do and more about the things we can never do again. Sure, I could theoretically go to Prague or Dublin or Lisbon this year, but I can never ever be 25 in Prague, or 25 in Lisbon, or 25 and in love with the girl I let slip away because she terrified me. It’s natural to think about the person I would be today if I had done any of those things, instead of the things I did. But this fantasy of different choices elides the constraint of me being the person doing the choosing. There is simply no world in which I chase after that girl because I wasn’t, at that point, a person who would do that. There is probably no world in which you settled down at 26 because you were the sort of person who goes to get a Ph.D instead. Hindsight cannot change that.

Which gets at the crux of the matter, Over. You aren’t old, you are merely disappointed. It can feel like the same thing but it’s not, which you are sure to discover 30 or 40 years from now. I know it’s not particularly helpful to hear that, nonetheless it’s the truth. Things will happen in your life you cannot imagine now; you will get things you have yet to discover you even want at all. There are years and years ahead of you to make good decisions and terrible ones. But you’re far more likely to make more of the latter kind if you indulge your envy now. It’s unfortunate that you got a Ph.D in the humanities right around the time a Ph.D in the humanities reached the nadir of its worth. It’s dispiriting that you haven’t met someone who will love you in the way you need. Neither of those things are particularly your fault, but nor are they at all the fault of the people in your life to whom different unfortunate and dispiriting things have happened. Withdrawing from those people only allows you to keep imagining that happiness is as easy as signing a mortgage.

Some people are claimed early by bitterness. You can spot them pretty easily — the querulous, the chronically disappointed. Maybe you were taught by one of these people, or employed by one, or raised by one. These are not fun people to be around. They are shabby and mean, and they probably all became that way one tiny resentment at a time. It is perfectly understandable, when you are feeling a bit lost and directionless, to want to avoid those anchored firmly in place. You assume they will view your lack of attachments as a failure, but in truth some probably envy the chance to start over so unencumbered.

You can choose to resist the instinct to make your world smaller because it feels so small. You can recognize the difference between making a living and making a life. You can imagine yourself, well and truly old, looking back to where you are now, and being grateful you kept close hold of your friends.

Love,

A Fuck Up

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Dear Fuck Up,

I love both my fat sister and my fat-shaming husband, but my obstinate husband makes loving them both very difficult.

My sister is proud of being fat, she sees it as a sign that she is fully recovered from an eating disorder. I love her and am so proud of her. As teenagers we weren’t close, but since I’ve had a baby we’ve become really close (she is an amazing auntie!). When Covid allows I like to take my daughter to visit her and we have great girls’ days.

The trouble is that my very active, very “healthy” husband is fatphobic. He firmly believes that weight management is as simple as calories in, calories out, and will not listen to me when I explain the complexities. He also refuses to see how she has changed and mellowed over the years (she and I occasionally argued when we were younger). They are polite to each other, but there is no hope of anything more.

My husband and I don’t have a will and that is purely because we can’t agree on who should look after our daughter if we both die. I want my amazing, creative, sister to look after her, but he does not. There is no other family in our country who could look after her (and we wouldn’t want to disrupt her life by moving her across the world to live with family). I think he is worried that our daughter would become fat, but I think being loved is worth the “risk”.

How can I make him realize that being fat doesn’t mean you’re unhealthy and inactive anymore than being slim means you’re healthy and active? I really want them to have a wonderful relationship, or at the very least not to let his dislike of her color our daughter’s feelings for her aunt.

Thanks,

Fat positive

Dear Positive,

I’m not sure you grasp the real problem here. Yes, your husband is wrong about why people are fat and what being fat means about a person, but he is going beyond “obstinance” in this devotion to being wrong. He is so attached to being wrong about this that he is willing to be cruel to someone you love in order to defend his wrongness. However he came to believe that he’s a good, strong person for staying thin and your sister is a bad, weak one for being fat, this is all operating at a much deeper level than a difference of opinion. It’s entirely possible that seeing your sister become happier and calmer and more sure of herself as she’s abandoned the very “virtues” he clings to is only causing him to dig deeper and become more strident. The idea that she could be less healthy now than when she had an eating disorder is so noxious and absurd on its face that I’m not going to be able to provide One Weird Trick for making him realize anything.

Your husband sounds like a dick, and I think the best thing you can do for your sister is to keep him away from her. She surely knows what he thinks of her, and even if this were to somehow change nobody really likes knowing that someone had to be educated into being nice to them. Cordial is enough.

The bigger issue, Positive, is that you don’t just have a sister, you have a daughter. Your husband isn’t simply in danger of tainting your daughter’s relationship with her aunt but of tainting her relationship with her own body.

There are so many ways to fuck up a kid, and I’m certainly no expert on parenting, but I think one of the most pernicious ones is to instill in them a fear that there is a wrong kind of body to have. To grow up knowing that there will be expectations about the shape hers takes, and failure to meet that expectation will mean she’s failed her father. There’s nothing more unhealthy than knowing that your parent’s love for you is frail and anemic. Already he is denying her something good and necessary — the potential of care in your absence — because he is incapable of trusting someone whose body he dislikes.

If you are going to raise a child with this man you need to understand the full scope of what’s at stake here. Your husband is mean and miserly with his ability to love people and you need to make him face that and figure out why before your daughter goes on her first diet.

Love,

A Fuck Up

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Dear Fuck Up,

My boyfriend of two years ghosted me. We’d been long-distance for about six months. We’d been having problems, and rather than talk it out like adults, he stopped responding to my texts and calls entirely. I was forced to end a relationship with someone I thought I was going to marry with a text and an email. And I’m fucking pissed. 

It’s been a month, and I recently found out that he’s seeing someone and might have been seeing her while we were together. I confronted him about it over text and he denied it, but he still refused to engage in any sort of conversation that resembles closure. It was just a couple of mean texts, sent back and forth. I’m angry. I’m sad and hurt and feel absolutely gutted. Maybe most of all, I’m furious at the injustice of not having any sort of end-of-a-relationship talk. How did the person I told everything become the person who ignores me, probably forever? I don’t think the dynamic is going to change. But I don’t want to accept it. How do I become okay with the toxic silence between us?

Sincerely,

Ghosted and Gutted

Dear Ghosted,

The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote a line I think about a lot. In her book Love’s Work, she says, “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.” It is a very beautiful way of articulating a hideous truth: that we do not consent to be hurt or abandoned by those we love, and that the most we can hope for is they do it kindly. Your ex couldn’t even give you that. What he did to you was awful; he is cowardly and he is cruel. But what happened isn’t simply unjust, it points to something much more frightening — that love itself exists outside the framework of justice. There is no court at which to plead your case, no authority who can grant you recompense.

This is a terrible thing to contemplate, and naturally the mind rebels. After a particularly surprising break-up we all prefer not to know this, just as we prefer not to know that the person you loved does not love you back. Not enough to stay, and in your case not even enough to be gracious as they leave. This knowledge is a rupture, and so we grasp at the fiction of closure.

And closure is a fiction. It is not real, at least not in the way you want it to be. What you actually want is something impossible: for this not to have happened or, at the very least, for him to be crushed under of the weight of it. Wanting impossible things isn’t necessarily bad; it’s a core component of being a person. We basically have to keep wanting the impossible right up until the moment we cease wanting anything at all precisely because that moment will come and we do not want it to.

Perhaps the most impossible thing we all want is for the things that happen to us to make sense. Our most tragic impulse is the one to make meaning when life is just a series of contingencies. It leads some people, like myself, to have a hard time getting over being wounded. I fixate, I wallow, I simultaneously feel humiliated that I could care for someone so obviously unworthy and convinced I will never find anyone as good again. “How do I get over someone?” might be the question I get most regularly, and I have not answered it yet simply because there is no real answer.

This is a cold comfort, I know, but it is worth remembering this: Your ex sucks shit and the silence between you isn’t toxic, it is necessary. There is nothing you can say to him to make him feel sufficiently guilty, nothing he could realistically say to you to take back the fact that he made the choices he did, no adequate combination of the right words in the right order to make any of this okay. 

Give up on closure and focus on other things. Go do something you always wanted to do but he thought was stupid. Cut your hair. Sell every piece of furniture he so much as sat on and redecorate your apartment. Write the meanest letter you can and — this is key! You must listen to this part because in the past I have not and it was a mistake — do not send it. Keep it and reread it from time to time to track how differently you begin to feel.

Because you will feel differently, in time. I sometimes think that in all of human history the only truly good advice is “this too shall pass.” How you feel now is not how you will feel tomorrow. Of course, the agony of love without justice is that other people’s feelings can change, but there is comfort in knowing that yours will too.

Love,
A Fuck Up

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